MARKETING

Underperforming CRM? Alternatives Exist

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems can assist hospitals in organizing current patient data. However, they frequently underperform when it comes to enabling efficient, targeted marketing, and health care marketers can be left with frustration and wasted time as they try to work with these expensive, suboptimal platforms. 

What many health care marketers don’t know is that innovative, low-cost alternatives already exist, allowing savvy marketers to provide measurable results that can inform the development of strategically sound growth plans. Details of these options were discussed at a presentation at the Society for Health Care Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD) Connections conference, held last September. 

When CRM systems are functioning well, they can provide organizations with detailed metrics regarding patient attribution, care needs, and customer demographics. Such data allows for the development of campaigns aimed at influencing audiences, and tracking information provides key calculations for return on investment (ROI) and necessary follow-up. 

“That’s what we should all be accomplishing with CRMs,” says Ty Allen, the CEO of SocialClimb, a health care marketing platform. “The problem is CRMs are difficult to use and often the most expensive item in a marketer’s tech stack.” 

Surveys gauging how health care marketers grade various marketing tools consistently rank CRMs as the lowest value tool when compared with spending on social media, website strategy, digital marketing, and content strategy. This begs the question: Can marketers effectively attract and target patients without the use of a CRM?  

Attracting Patients without a CRM 

The truth is the retail market has changed consumer expectations in health care. The sense of immediacy that consumers expect has grown dramatically in recent years. While HIPAA makes this more difficult to implement in health care settings, retail applications have changed the expectations of how health care should work and have led to the launch of new health care services. 

Allen has observed that five to seven years ago most patients would come to hospitals or practices through referrals—from either physicians or insurance companies, with roughly 10% arriving via personal web searches on sites such as Google. Today, the split is closer to 50/50, with half of patients finding Health care providers through Google or social media channels. 

As a result, savvy organizations have realized the shift in consumer (patient) behavior and have started changing the way they attract patients. “As an example,” Allen states, “if there are two competing health care facilities and one decides to leverage digital marketing, the facility using marketing will be able to attract more patients with higher lifetime values.” He goes on to say, “If you are asleep at the wheel and your competitors start proactively using the right marketing techniques, they are going to improve their patient mix and start converting a much higher percentage of all the patients in your competitive market.” 

Targeting High-Value or High-Need Patients Without CRM 

Attracting patients that are actively searching for care is fantastic, as those patients have strong intent to schedule appointments. But what about targeting patients before they actively search for a physician on Google? In other words, how can you add demand generation to your marketing strategy without the use of a CRM? Targeting prospective patients in health care has always been a challenge with HIPAA privacy regulations. Historically, patient targeting relied heavily upon look-alike audiences based on the online browsing patterns of anonymous web searchers. This search data was then used to “predict” patient care needs and used in Google, Bing and other social media platforms. Despite lack-luster results, this targeting method is often used by practices to avoid spending on a costly CRM. 

However, advances in technology and data analytics have allowed for a new kind of targeting to emerge. “Developments with data analytics allow SocialClimb to build HIPAA-compliant data models to predict patient needs with astonishing accuracy.” says Allen.  “With over 100 million data records in our system, we have been able to build 320 patient targeting models in 16 (and growing) specialties to help health care facilities market to prospective patients with 90%+ probability of needing very specific care.

“Typically, this type of targeting has been reserved to costly CRMs at very large health care organizations.”

The advantages of these nontraditional approaches to CRM are that they are generally easy to implement and fully trackable to inform effective, innovative marketing solutions.  

Nontraditional Efforts in Practice 

Katrice Sisson is one of the innovative members of her industry putting these principles to work. She began her position as the manager of community and donor relations at Winona Health, in Winona, MN., in January 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, the hospital had a social media presence on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, yet it had a low Google rating of 2.3 stars and only 127 reviews. 

“In a small town and rural community, word of mouth is gold,” Sisson notes, with patients trusting feedback from their family and friends, as well as review sites such as Google. “We found that Google was being used at the practice but not optimized. We were only hearing from people who had a bad experience and were motivated to leave a bad online review. We weren’t hearing from the majority of patients that they were satisfied with their care.” 

These comments hurt both the hospital’s reputation and staff morale, particularly as COVID-related burnout affected employees. 

“We knew we were providing excellent care; we just weren’t getting excellent feedback. We really needed to capture the good,” Sisson says.  

To re-energize marketing efforts, Winona Health partnered with SocialClimb in March 2021. The first step, Allen recalls, was to “start by going where the patients were,” which meant Google. “Eighty-four percent of patients are going to start a search online—not on your website—before they make a decision about a health care provider,” he notes. 

So, the teams focused efforts on Google Business pages to promote practices and doctors via three components: accuracy, authority, and content. The best part was that Google Business Profile pages are easily manageable and free of charge. “They are basically little micro-sites that you can either ignore at your own peril or get control of, properly configure, and leverage,” Allen explains. “If you do it the right way, they will be more valuable in attracting patients into your organization than your own website. People read reviews about a specific doctor, not as much the facility.” 

Accuracy on these pages means ensuring all pertinent information is included and is correct, he adds. In addition, a process was implemented in which at the end of their care cycle, patients were invited by text message or email to leave feedback about their experience. They could do so via public social media sites, an immediate survey, or a private review which would be seen only by their provider and care team. 

Engaging the content possibilities offered by these pages meant linking social media channels directly to Business Pages. 

“If you are not taking social media content you are producing and putting it on your Google Business Profile page, you are missing out on an opportunity,” Allen says. “It gives those pages fresh content and makes them rank higher in the search results.” 

Optimizing Google Business pages and ratings resulted in dramatic increases in inbound calls and website clicks for Winona Health—four to five times those seen at the hospital during 2019. “This is a good, non-traditional, non-CRM way to increase volumes,” Allen says. “It is the lowest cost, most effective thing you can do to grow overall inbound patients.”